Family separations have stopped, but how will children and parents be reunited?

Government provided video shows more than 1,100 people inside metal cages in a warehouse that's divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children.
USA TODAY

Children and workers are seen at a tent encampment recently built near the Tornillo Port of Entry on June 19, 2018 in Tornillo, Texas. The Trump administration is using the Tornillo tent facility to house immigrant children separated from their parents after they were caught entering the U.S. under the administration's zero tolerance policy.(Photo11: Joe Raedle, Getty Images)

President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending the policy of separating children from parents at the border, but critics say the government failed to create an effective system for tracking the more than 2,000 children separated from parents.

And, as a result, reuniting them will be extremely difficult.

Some parents have already been deported without their children and advocates fear more parents will be sent back to their home countries while their children remain in the United States, either in shelters under government custody or with sponsors after they have been released.

Deporting parents without their children will make it all the more difficult to reunite families separated at the border under Trump's zero-tolerance policy, further adding to the trauma already caused by the separations, advocates say.

“We have seen no evidence of any system that has been put in place by the government,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, a group that provides legal assistance to unaccompanied migrant children. “It continues to be a chaotic process.”

Without a federal process, it will be left to attorneys from nongovernmental groups to piece together clues that might help connect children with their families, Young said in a conference call with reporters. Federal public defenders in Texas, where the majority of the family separations have taken place, have also taken on the additional role of trying to locate separated children.

“We have seen no evidence of any system that has been put in place by the government. It continues to be a chaotic process.”

Many of the children separated from parents are toddlers and haven't yet learned to speak, adding to the challenges of reuniting them with parents, said Lauren Dasse, executive director of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, an organization that provides pro bono legal services to unaccompanied minors and adults detained in Arizona.

The Florence Project has received about 467 cases this year of children separated from parents or parents separated from children, she said. They have seen 112 cases since Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in May that the zero-tolerance policy had been implemented.

The cases of separated children and parents began arriving even before the zero-tolerance policy was announced in April, but soared afterward, she said.

"Recently, we have seen a huge shift; many of our clients are young, very young, preverbal," she said. "We've even had children with disabilities who are our clients and have been separated from their parents, so they are very distraught and in some instances inconsolable."

The departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Agencies upon agencies

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Under the zero-tolerance policy aimed at deterring illegal immigration, the Justice Department directed the Border Patrol to refer all parents who entered the country illegally for criminal prosecution.

Because of legal restrictions prohibiting children from being held in jails, the policy resulted in children being taken away at the border and reclassified as unaccompanied minors, and then transferred to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. That agency places unaccompanied minors in a network of over 100 shelters scattered across the country in 15 states.

Meanwhile, parents prosecuted under the zero-tolerance policy were placed in the custody of a separate agency, the U.S. Marshal, until their prosecution was complete, and then transferred to the custody of yet another agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which holds adults in detention centers also scattered across the country.

"A lot of parents are actually being transferred to detention centers all over the country," Dasse said

As a result, many of the more than 2,300 children separated from parents at the border are now being held in shelters in separate states from their parents, further complicating the government’s ability to track children and parents, and reuniting them, advocates say.

“It’s a really heavy lift, logistically. It would be easier if they (the federal government) kept the cases together.”

Jennifer Nagda, The Young Center

That a child’s immigration case proceeds on a different track, and with a different agency from the parents’ case, which is under the jurisdiction of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, complicates matters, Young said.

“My attorneys have become private investigators,” Young said. "They look for clues, such as a child’s date of birth, or their alien-registration number, and start pulling those threads to find the parents."

The problem for attorneys, however, is that many of the separated children are very young, said Jennifer Nagda of The Young Center, another nonprofit group providing legal defense services for children.

Ask them their mom and dad’s names, she said, and they’ll say “Mom and Dad.”

“It’s a really heavy lift, logistically,” said Nagda, the center’s policy director. “It would be easier if they (the federal government) kept the cases together.”

It wasn't until just last week that the federal government began issuing identification numbers to families being separated at the border in McAllen, in South Texas, said Michele Brané, director of migrant rights and justice for the Women’s Refugee Commission.

She learned about the family-identification numbers while wrapping up a visit to McAllen, where the majority of the family separations have taken place at a Border Patrol processing center.

The family-identification numbers would presumably stay in the case files of both the parents and the children, providing a link, she said.

”My concern is, it was not implemented until last week,” she said.

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NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio says 239 children who have been separated from their parents are being held at social services facilities in Harlem. (June 21)
AP